The Pirates and Orioles agreed on a trade to send Travis Snider to Baltimore tonight in exchange for minor league lefty Stephen Tarpley and a player to be named later. On its face, this seems like a bit of a strange move for a contender to make: even if you assume that Gregory Polanco was […]

The Orioles have rekindled their trade talks with the Pittsburgh Pirates to acquire outfielder Travis Snider and are discussing a deal that would send one or two minor leaguers to Pittsburgh, according to industry sources.

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Neither minor leaguer being discussed is thought to be on the Orioles’ 40-man roster, but at least one — and possibly both — is a pitcher.

Connolly is tweeting updates (including a name: Steven Brault), so you should follow him for the latest news. I don’t really want to spend a ton of time speculating beyond noting that while Snider was a very useful player down the stretch last year, the Pirates have some redundancy in the left-handed corner outfielder department with Gregory Polanco and Andrew Lambo. If there is a trade, I’d rather hold off on judgment until we’re sure who’s in it.

Josh Harrison is why we watch sports. In June of 2013, I saw him playing in a Triple-A game in Durham. He played well enough that I came back from the game thinking to myself, “Yeah, I think he’s probably ready to take Brandon Inge’s spot as a utility player.” In early July of 2014, […]

Neil Walker is a perfect storm. He, perhaps first and foremost, a wonderful story. He was drafted out of high school by his hometown team as a catcher in 2004, but he wasn’t all that well suited to the position and injuries eventually forced him to third base. In 2007, he moved to third base. […]

This is an unpopular opinion, but I think there’s a decent chance that Pedro Alvarez will be the exact first baseman the Pirates need him to be in 2015. This is buried well underneath the throwing problems, the position change, the power outage, and the foot injury, but in 2014, Pedro Alvarez finally did the […]

The problem with the question, “How do you replace Russell Martin?” is that it’s a trick question. If we define “Russell Martin” as a very strong defensive catcher with an emphasis on pitch-framing that has decent on-base abilities (at least as it comes to walk-percentage) and decent pop for the position, well, I think the Pirates […]

But I’d like to propose that, at least when it comes to fielding, Kang and the Pirates are a wonderful fit for one another, defensively speaking.

I say this because Neal Huntington and his analytics team have been pulling off a wonderful trick for the last three years: in each season, the Pirates have put together an above-average defensive BABIP despite having a roster full of mostly-below-average defensive players.

I’d recommend checking the whole thing out because there are a lot of interesting thoughts, but yeah, I think that that’s the value of the Pirates’ shifting: hiding sub-par defenders that can hit (Neil Walker, Pedro Alvarez in 2012 and 2013) inside of a functional defense that’s good at turning balls in play into outs. In that regard, the Pirates taking a risk on Kang makes a ton of sense, because they might be able to hide him at a premium defensive position better than other teams.

Honestly, Vance Worley is one of the pitchers that I found the most interesting as last year wore on, and he’s probably going to get the shortest post in this whole series. The reason is that Jeff Sullivan at FanGraphs more or less did my work for me here, with his post from late last […]

I have probably written more words about Charlie Morton than any other Pirate pitcher of the last five years, and so I’m a little embarrassed to say that it’s probably easy enough to preview Morton’s 2015 season thusly: if he’s healthy, he’ll be fine, but it’s always hard to say if Charlie Morton will be […]

If you eliminate all of the drama surrounding AJ Burnett’s departure from the Pirates last winter, we’re left with a few important facts. AJ Burnett is 38 years old, coming off of a relatively bad season in which he pitched with a sports hernia and saw his strikeouts go down with his velocity while his […]

This shouldn’t be surprising, but I’m not a big fan of anecdotal analysis like, “Francisco Liriano is only good every other year.” It works nice as a descriptive device, but it doesn’t give us much actual understanding about Francisco Liriano. In Liriano’s case, the pattern doesn’t even hold true: Liriano was excellent in 2006, decent in 2008, […]

This is Gerrit Cole’s traditional box score in eleven starts spread out over two Septembers: 71 1/3 IP, 60 H, 23 R, 22 ER, 16 BB, 84 K, 3 HR Those numbers represent the ideal Gerrit Cole, the snarling bastard that can throw four pitches that look the same out of his hand, but can […]